Evaluation of sites

To find websites I’ll like, I follow websites I already like. This is not the point here. My contests attempt to be open, diverse and objective by using publicly available figures. How do websites get added to the list?

This methodology estimates the popularity of websites. It is scientific in that it calculates valuation from objective metrics.

Google also manipulates the public PageRanks for their corporate agenda. That makes at least two reasons why we should not limit ourselves to this metric. You can find details at a rant on Google PageRank.

Traffic

This is the democratic metric. It assesses the number of people who are likely to visit the website next month. These numbers are not taken from the webservers and therefore do not show the actual traffic.

This measure derives from the USA traffic levels measured by Compete.com. The Cellarer metric is improved from the Compete value. The Compete figures over the past year are averaged and trended so that an aggregate is built. A bonus is given to non-US sites so that the final figure shows worldwide traffic.

The Compete figure is not available for sites that do not use their own domain name. Such sites are thus put at a disadvantage on this criterion. The public numbers and those of many other hosted blogs are very low because their traffic is not tracked independently of that of their platform.
There are two separate ways out of this problem:
- Get your own domain as Robert McIntosh did. This shows a long-term commitment to the site.
- Get liked by Google. This is the situation of the numerous sites currently showing in the ranked list.

On the contrary the same sites are favoured by the other metric (PageRank) since they receive links from well known platforms — which (usually) have nothing do to with the niche (food or wine). Examples: the New York Times, Blogspot.

Valuation

The valuation is a sum (in USD) that the website could sell for. This is hypothetical: it is a value that would serve as a reference if the owner wanted to sell and if she negotiated with a buyer.

There are a lot of things to consider for assessing how much a website is worth. Most of them are not public information: the revenue, the number of subscribers and registered users. Cellarer.com calculates the valuation by aggregating two metrics: PageRank and traffic. Eh! we have just done bulk site appraisal!

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on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 at 2:36 pm and is filed under websites.
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